Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

Sam Hartman hartmans@mit.edu
Mon, 09 Dec 2002 13:57:11 -0500


>>>>> "Marshall" == Marshall Rose <mrose@dbc.mtview.ca.us> writes:



    Marshall> considering that you have 13 folks who enjoy
    Marshall> above-average intellegence, substantive professional
    Marshall> accomplishment, meaningful community goodwill, etc., i
    Marshall> don't know why this is.  the problem didn't start with
    Marshall> the sitting IESG, as it seems we've been on this slope
    Marshall> for a while.

It may well be that no is simply the wrong answer.  I've heard a lot
of people here discussing specific problems and I'm starting to
believe there may even be consensus that certain issues like
timeliness actually are problems.

However not all problems can be solved.  Sometimes when you make a
tradeoff between something like killing a group for lack of progress
and not doing the standards work, you may find that really the right
decision is to to accept that in this one instance you will not be
timely because the work is valuable even if late.


It may even turn out that you'll find that you end up having to decide
against timeliness enough that your process cannot be said to be timely at all.  

So, I think to support your claim that the IESG is not saying no
enough you need to look at specific instances where you believe the
IESG should have said no and didn't.  I realize that I'm directly
asking you to second-guess the IESG.  But you seem to be saying that
the IESG should be saying no more.  I don't know how to evaluate
whether that is true without looking at specific instances and
considering all the factors that could have gone into the
decisions--not just the factor of timeliness of progress.


--Sam